Deadliest religion ever?

[Jesster]

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The deadliest religion ever is the one that includes deity worship.

Um no, China has had parts of its history which were lead by very superstitious religious and very brutal leaders, not under modern communism, but in antiquity. The Terracotta Warriors of antiquity were trained to be blind loyalists to their ruler, and within their ranks it was very Orwellian and dissent was met with brutality, on top of the age of their conquests. 

Even the dictators of modern Asia like Mao and Po Pot ruled over majority religions. North Korea also has it's own brand of religion. Deity worship isn't required for a religion to become brutal. You have to read and compare religion not just now, but everywhere in time throughout our species history to see this.

I can pull up even modern stories of Buddhists persecuting Muslims. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecutio...in_Myanmar

There are only more active volcanos and more dormant volcanos over centuries, but power shifts over time and a less dormant volcano can become more active over time. No group of humans is immune to future barbarity if the conditions lead to that. It is only by understanding a global history of the past we can reduce the risk of repeating that barbarity in the future.

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[Brian37]

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Um no, China has had parts of its history which were lead by very superstitious religious and very brutal leaders, not under modern communism, but in antiquity. The Terracotta Warriors of antiquity were trained to be blind loyalists to their ruler, and within their ranks it was very Orwellian and dissent was met with brutality, on top of the age of their conquests. 

Even the dictators of modern Asia like Mao and Po Pot ruled over majority religions. North Korea also has it's own brand of religion. Deity worship isn't required for a religion to become brutal. You have to read and compare religion not just now, but everywhere in time throughout our species history to see this.

I can pull up even modern stories of Buddhists persecuting Muslims. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecutio...in_Myanmar

There are only more active volcanos and more dormant volcanos over centuries, but power shifts over time and a less dormant volcano can become more active over time. No group of humans is immune to future barbarity if the conditions lead to that. It is only by understanding a global history of the past we can reduce the risk of repeating that barbarity in the future.

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Text is hard to read intent, especially without something like a 

I was being serious, because I do run into on the web, not just here, but elsewhere atheists who defend Buddhism IE Sam Harris, and other garbage like si fi fans of Star Trek. Ok, you were joking, now I know. Others do however try to use the "this one is less violent" argument. I don't just deal with you and I don't simply post on one website.

[SteveII]

I agree with your point, but would add that to claim a religion is deadly, you would have to look at the religious teachings themselves to make a determination. Do the teachings promote violence? If not, the religion is not 'deadly' and any deaths that may have occurred in it's name should be laid at the feet of the people committing them.

There are surface readings which reinforce your point.  But religion isn't a surface phenomena, nor is it exclusively contained within the writings of the faith.  Messages about purity and defilement are interwoven throughout Christianity and support  things like xenophobia, us versus them mentality, and purification regimes.  The deeper, structural meaning of Christianity does indeed support violence, in spite of your attempt to misdirect by only focusing on "the teachings."  The violence of the first millennia didn't just spring unbidden from individual actors.  It had a source in the themes of the religion.  Horrors like the albigensian crusade spring whole cloth from the themes of Christianity.

I don't agree. Where could you possibly construe anything in the NT that would support any crusade of violence? Even if the whole organized church thought it was a good idea, that would not mean they got it from the NT. Even if their motives were as they said they were, at best it was classic ends-justifies-the-means fallacy--which is decidedly not NT.

In fact, there is no support for an organized church in the NT that would have the political power and the extra-biblical sway over the population that developed with the Catholic Church. That was a man-made creation and as such, man should shoulder the blame for its decisions.

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You are conflating Christianity with the OT theocracy. The two covenants are very different in their context, structure, and goals.

I'm not, but if jettisoning the foundation of your shared faith tradition is necessary in order to defend it against itself and comparison to islam.... I hardly see the point in bickering with you?

I don't think that recognizing very obvious changes in context, structure, and goals is jettisoning the earlier in favor of the latter. You can't ignore the differences and they need some sort of reconciliation and framework to understand them both (technically happening in what is formally known as systematic theology).

[Edwardo Piet]

Right so Paul wasn't being intentionally dense he was being unintentionally dense.

Apparently scare quotes only apply to single words now even when they're used for a full sentence

I stand by my initial statement. You don't understand the scare quotes in the meme, Paul.

[paulpablo]

Right so Paul wasn't being intentionally dense he was being unintentionally dense.

Apparently scare quotes only apply to single words now even when they're used for a full sentence

I stand by my initial statement. You don't understand the scare quotes in the meme, Paul.

They weren't wrapped around a full sentence they were around a phrase withnin a sentence. The phrase being "stoned to death".

The full stop indicates where the sentence finishes.

Like I said, in my opinion the creator of the meme probably used those scare quotes to indicate contempt for the phrase.

[Crunchy]

All religions share the danger of putting faith ahead of reason. All of them.

However, not all religions are equally dangerous in the same way at the same time because their ideologies do in fact differ from one another. To argue that they are all the same is to argue that words don't matter and have no meaning and also ignores real world behavior. Islam and Christianity are both bad, but they are not the same, not even close. 

I think where people get tripped up is in ignoring patterns of behavior and focus on the individual 100% of the time. Ideologies are not followed and interpreted the same way by every follower, even secular ideologies. This does not mean that different patterns of behavior can't be observed or have different consequences. 

I believe it's a mistake to ignore the larger patterns so that individuals can be convinced it's OK to believe whatever they want to believe and that even horrible teachings are somehow consequence free because many followers ignore them and are good people. For example, this is the flawed thinking that allows many non muslims to claim that Islam is a religion of peace when clearly it is not. Their motive is to protect good peaceful muslims from criticism and violent backlash (which is a good motive) but they seem to not realize that they are also protecting a violent ideology that also causes a great deal of suffering in the world. 

Right now, Islam is the most dangerous religion the world is having to deal with and it's not even a close call.

[Edwardo Piet]

They weren't wrapped around a full sentence they were around a phrase withnin a sentence. The phrase being "stoned to death".

The full stop indicates where the sentence finishes.

More irrelevant truths from you.

Like I said, in my opinion the creator of the meme probably used those scare quotes to indicate contempt for the phrase.

LOL. No the scare quotes are clearly meant to mean that 'stoned to death' didn't include unbiblical stoning. It's obvious as fuck.

Your entire first objection that you 'doubt it's true' showed you were being obtuse.

Yeah... I'm wasting my time explaining things here.

Also LOL when you called me a scruffy little cunt. I'm not scruffy little or a cunt

[paulpablo]

You were talking about scare quotes applying to single words even when they're used for full sentences.

I said in the meme they weren't used for a single word or a full sentence. They were used for a phrase. What I was saying was directly related to what you were saying.

[Edwardo Piet]

I made my point repeatedly and it's beyond obvious what I meant at this point. You're just being pedantic and disingenuous.

The phrase 'stoned to death' was in quotes because it obviously refers to biblical stoning.

"No one was ever 'stoned to death' by an atheist." makes more sense than "No one was ever stoned to death by an atheist" because it's easier to make a retarded "I doubt that statement is true" comment if the scare quotes are left out. But even when the scare quotes are there you pretend to not understand their meaning.

[paulpablo]

You're way too sure of your own opinion.

You're not even being ambiguous about which religious texts the meme is talking about.

So you know that this meme was created to specifically talk about biblical stoning and not any other religion such as Islam?

And you still haven't really explained what you were talking about when you said something about scare quotes applying to individal words even when they're used in full sentences.

I never said it was used in this meme for an individual word or the sentence, it's used around that phrase and I've said I think I know why it's used around that phrase and my reasoning relates to how scare quotes are used unlike your reasoning.

Your reasoning jumps straight to you knowing for a fact the scare quotes mean the person who made the meme is talking about people who stoned people to death relating to the bible.